Ph.D. in Label Reading

You do have to get a doctorate's degree in label-reading. Check out this very long list of unacceptable ingredients, and visions of chemistry dance in your head.Most large health food stores carry products labeled gluten-free for all of the people with celiac disease. Even Walmart has a gluten-free recipe section at their website and puts "gluten-free" on every Great Value product it can.


Casein-free labels, like the one on the left, are much more elusive. The OU Kosher symbol or words parve or pareve means the food is casein-free.


However, anyone can make mistakes and it is a good idea to read the ingredients, just in case-in. Non-dairy products can contain casein, according to the FDA. For example, both original and lite versions of Cremora have sodium caseinate! At the end of the ingredients, they put soy, an allergen, in bold. Why milk is not there is beyond me!

Ingredients:
Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, canola, and/or palm kernel), corn syrup solids, sugar, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), dipotassium phosphate, monoglycerides, natural flavor, salt, silicon dioxide, sodium tripolyphosphate, vitamin E acetate, DATEM, lutein, artificial color, soy lecithin. May Contain Soy Products.

You also have to deal with cross-contamination, which happens in the manufacturing site and in the home! When you use the same toaster for gluten-filled and gluten-free foods, tiny bits of gluten contaminate the gluten-free food. If you spread mayonnaise on wheat bread with a knife and use that same knife on the gluten-free bread, tiny bits of gluten end up in the gluten-free sandwich. Manufacturers often make regular products and gluten-free, casein-free ones on the same lines. Many rinse the lines between productions, which may or may not eliminate the problem depending on how rigorously they rinse. Some up the ante by sterilizing and cleaning equipment between each item. You never really know unless you call or your child reacts to an individual product.

To be honest, I do not worry about cross-contamination anymore because Pamela has not reacted in years. In the early stages of the diet, cross-contaminate was a big problem for her; the least little amount of the wrong food would cause irritability, rashes, incontinence, fogginess, difficulty speaking, and other things Pamela could not express. I recommend people in the early stages of the diet being vigilant about cross-contamination, especially if they are not seeing any improvements. I do believe that children have a residual amount of opioids in their bodies in the early stages of the diet and even little infractions push the levels above what they can tolerate. In fact, it can take up to two years for opioid levels to drop in the urine.

Is your head spinning?

Take a deep cleansing breath!

The biggest tip is to start the diet s l o w l y.

Why? Introducing the diet slowly gives you time to figure everything out without getting a blistering migraine! The first shopping trip is the most difficult because you spend so much time reading labels and thinking about complicated things that make unit price calculations a breeze. Even if you buy the products listed at a gluten-free/casein-free website, you should read the labels, just in case! If you plan to implement the diet in Granny fashion (making recipes from scratch--the cheapest way possible), you will have to devote time coming up with menu plans and recipes before you make the mother of all shopping lists.

Whether it is a ten-week plan or five stages or whatever makes sense to you, going slow benefits the child, too. Think about the reason why some need the diet: their bodies are turning gluten and casein into morphine. Going "cold turkey" off of these addictive foods can cause withdrawal symptoms! Some kids get worse before they get better on this diet because of the morphine.

Typical Thanksgiving without Gluten and Casein

What are gluten and casein you ask? They are both proteins. Casein is a protein found in mammal milk. Do not confuse lactose (-ose means sugar) with casein (-ein means protein). Lactose-free products may still have casein in it. Milk from cows, goats, and sheep all contain casein. While butter is mainly fat, it may contain trace amounts of casein. The most bizarre thing with casein is tuna--they add sodium caseinate to tuna for some odd reason. As you can imagine, a GFCF dieter must become quite a reader of labels!

Gluten is the sticky stuff that makes bread wonderful; wheat, rye, barley and spelt contain gluten. Most oats contain gluten because they are raised in fields that previously grew wheat. However, Bob's Red Mill offers two kinds of GLUTEN-FREE oatmeal: gluten-free rolled oats and gluten-free steel cut oats. Pamela has not reacted to these products, thank you very much. Here is a blurb from Bob's Red Mill on oats:

Gluten-sensitive consumers have avoided commercially grown oats because they can be subject to cross-contact with gluten-containing grains during planting, harvest, transport, milling and packaging.

To solve this dilemma and provide a beloved food (used for breads, cookies, cakes, breakfasts and more) to the 3 million Americans diagnosed with Celiac Disease, Bob's Red Mill has sourced oats from more than 200 pedigree-seed oat farmers dedicated to growing pure oats.

Once harvested, the oats undergo testing to meet the R5 ELISA standards, a rigorous test for the presence of gluten. Only oats that pass this test are shipped to Bob's Red Mill. They are again tested before they are packaged in the company's dedicated gluten free facility. Batch testing is performed once more after packaging.

Now before you balk and freak out because you cannot imagine baking without gluten or casein, I hope to encourage, maybe inspire you with yummy foods for the most food-obsessed day of the year: Thanksgiving!

My mother found an awesome and completely gf/cf recipe for cranberry fruit conserve. The only change I made was I skipped the zest (which I detest) and used only one cup of sugar. Mom gave me two lemons and pecans fresh off the tree! Everybody raved about the conserve, and they were none the wiser about its lack of zest!

I made two kinds of gf/cf pie: a pumpkin pie and a pecan pie. For the pumpkin pie filling, I follow the directions on the back of a can of Libby's 100% pure pumpkin, substituting coconut milk for evaporated milk. For the pecan pie filling, I follow the directions on the back of the Karo light corn syrup bottle for classic pecan pie, substituting coconut milk for butter. For the shell of each, I made a pecan nut crust. For one shell, grind up about 1 1/2 cups of pecans with 1/4 cup of gf/cf flour (I used sorghum) in a food processor or blender until you have a fine meal. I poured the meal into a bowl. I boiled water, added one tablespoon of hot water to the meal, and mixed it together. Because the meal did not form a ball, I kept adding a tablespoon of hot water and stirred until a ball formed. I oiled a pan and pressed the meal into a pan with a small pizza dough roller to smooth out the shell. I pre-baked the crust for about 10 minutes. I added the filling and baked as prescribed in the recipe.

I made mashed potatoes by boiling four peeled and cubed baking potatoes and a head of peeled garlic. Once they were soft, I mashed the potatoes with a mixer and added salt and olive oil to taste. They were not as fluffy as those made with butter and milk, but very tasty. My mother made a standard gravy out of cornstarch, stock, and salt.

I made both two half loaves of cornbread, one for cornbread and one for stuffing. To make a loaf of cornbread, I mixed the dry ingredients in one bowl (1 1/2 cups cornmeal, a half cup gf/cf flour--sorghum, a teaspoon sea salt, and a tablespoon gf/cf baking powder) and beat the wet ingredients in another bowl (two tablespoons honey, two eggs, 1 1/4 cup coconut milk, and two tablespoons oil). I added the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stirred gently. Then I poured the mixture into an oiled 1.5-quart loaf pan and baked in a preheated oven at 425 degrees for about 30 minutes.

I baked a typical Southern style of cornbread stuffing. I chopped two stalks of celery, half an onion, and four ounces mushrooms and sautéed it in olive oil. At the last minute I added two tablespoons of minced garlic to the sautéed mixture so it would not burn. I chopped half a cup pecans and two boiled eggs. I cubed a half loaf of cornbread. Then I mixed it all together with three eggs and my favorite stuffing seasonings (thyme, marjoram, and sage). I added several cups gf/cf chicken stock until the mixture was moist. I poured it all in an oiled dish and baked it in a preheated oven at 350 degrees until the top looked crusty.

Pamela's special diet, which brought about tremendous improvement in her quality of life, reminds me of a person for whom I am thankful and whom I never met. That is Dr. Bernard Rimland. His newsletters gave me all kinds of wonderful ideas for helping Pamela, and I still look up information to this day. He died around Thanksgiving of 2006 and that was a great loss to the autism community.

Why Gluten-Free Casein Free?

GFCF stands for gluten-free, casein-free diet, a dietary intervention used by some families with children in the autism spectrum. My daughter Pamela went gluten and casein free back in 1995 when the selection of ingredients, much less packaged food, was sparse. At age 6.5, she was a potty failure because the opioids derived from gluten and casein (gluteomorphine and casomorphine) numbed her bladder. After two weeks on the diet, she controlled her bladder. She was diaper-free during the day after two months! Slowly she grew more at ease in social settings. Her spontaneous speech soared, and she taught herself pretend play. Pamela was more aware of her environment. Diet violations caused a rash, agitation, incontinence and temporary regression of language and abstract thinking.

Here are resources I wish had been available back in the day . . .

Two Web Sites:
The GFCF Diet Web Site
The Autism Network for Dietary Intervention

Three Helpful Books:
Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and PDD – A Mother’s Story of Research and Recovery tells you why the diet helps some kids from one family's perspective and a scientist's perspective.
Special Diets for Special Kids tells you how to implement the diet and has recipes.
Special Diets for Special Kids Two is a sequel with 175 new recipes and meal plans.

Research Summaries:
Harvard Gut Study
2002 Study
2001 Study
1999 Study Part I
1999 Study Part II
Specific Carbohydrate Diet

Diet and enzymes:
Enzyme Therapy
Enzymes as a Supplement Only

Letters from Parents:
Registered Dietician in 2001
Several Children Improving in 1997
Diet and Donna Williams in 1995
Positive Response in 1993
Handy Handout Explaining the Diet

You can find plenty of research at the online archives of the Autism Research Review International.